"A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand."

Cookies — who doesn’t love them, especially this time of year?

So to get you in the holiday spirit, we scoured our cooperative territories to find bakers who have spent years cultivating the cookie craft, much to the delight of their families and friends.

These sweet treats may come from the oven, but when it comes right down to it, they really come from the heart.

For a good cause

Somerset Rural Electric Cooperative (REC) members Michelle Kimmel and Pam Weimer share a spirit of giving and a love of cookies.

Kimmel bakes 15 dozen sugar cookies each year for the Christmas Cookie Walk, a fundraiser held at Shanksville’s St. Mark Lutheran Church. Then, she invites co-workers, friends and family to join her for a cookie-decorating party.

“I enjoy baking the cookies,” she says. “It’s a good way for people to get a selection of homemade cookies. It’s all donation-based, and the money goes to a good cause. People line up for this.”

Weimer enjoys helping Kimmel, a co-worker at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, with baking, but she definitely doesn’t want to miss out on decorating.

“We have a good evening and good fellowship for a great project,” she says. “People look forward to our cookies because they are so colorful. It’s fun. It’s creative, and they all turn out beautifully.”
 

Volunteer bakers from several area churches provide cookies for the holiday event, and participants can fill a box for $15. This year’s event will begin at 9 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 14, at the church, 823 Main St., Shanksville, with funds going to hurricane relief.

“Each year, we are grateful and amazed our community bakers amass this generous amount of cookies,” says Gayle Miller, one of the walk’s organizers, “and we feel blessed we can donate the proceeds to worthy charities.”

Pam Foor, an award-winning baker and member of Bedford REC, also whips up dozens of cookies this time of year — and as many as 15 different kinds — for family, friends and local holiday events. She mixes the dough before Thanksgiving, freezes it and then bakes the cookies as the holiday draws closer.

“Cookies are a grab-and-go, universal dessert,” Foor says.

But Theresa Lingle, customer service and billing supervisor at United Electric Cooperative in DuBois, has found that “people are pretty particular about their cookies.”

In her spare time, she creates confections for weddings and the cooperative’s annual meetings. Most of her regular baking, however, is done for family, where she concentrates on providing each person’s favorite. 

GETTING CREATIVE: Cookie blogger Barbara Hall scoops cookie dough onto a pan for baking. Hall creates all of her own recipes, which you can find at mycookiejourney.com.(Photo by Kathy Hackleman)
 

Getting creative

While Lingle calls herself a “hobbyist,” Adams Electric member Judy Morley has turned baking into a business. At the Gettysburg Cookie Company, she sells her creations on consignment to gift and coffee shops, at festivals, and online at gettysburgcookieco.com.

She also mixes her love of baking with her love of history by naming her cookies after local battlefields. There’s the Devil’s Den cookie (chocolate), the Peach Orchard cookie (with peaches), and the Last Full Measure (an “everything” cookie dedicated to the final line of The Gettysburg Address), along with others, including seasonal favorites.

During her first year in business at her former retail store, Morley sold more than 33,000 cookies. Now, using the consignment model, she sells about 1,000 cookies per month. Her busiest times are summer and Christmas.

Morley says she always liked to bake and when her daughter was very young, she committed herself to cooking healthy, good-tasting food using high-quality ingredients.

“You can throw healthy ingredients into a basic cookie recipe to make it healthier,” she says. “When I got the idea for a cookie company, I already knew how to modify recipes.”

In her weekly blog, mycookiejourney.com, Lancaster County resident Barbara Hall takes a more educational approach to cookies.

Designed for bakers of all levels, the blog includes detailed instructions for those who need them along with photos that show how the dough should look at each step. More experienced bakers, she says, can simply print a recipe and be on their way.

All recipes are her own creations, and she says her favorites are those that remind her of food she had as a child. For example, an aunt made a black walnut cake with brown sugar frosting, so she created a cookie using those flavors. 
 

“I take something that is not a cookie and figure out how I can make it into a cookie,” she says.

Her reward is in the creation of new recipes and how readers react to them.

“I have more fun designing and creating cookies than selling them,” she says. “Making the cookies look appealing through photography and writing the posts are what I enjoy most.”

Cookies and community

In Huntingdon County, Scott McKenzie says he had to make some decisions when the COVID-19 pandemic came along and he was furloughed from his job at Juniata College in 2020. They were: retire early, find something else to do, or be patient and wait for the college to reopen.

“I decided I would wait for Juniata, but I knew I couldn’t just sit around and feel sorry for myself,” McKenzie says, “so I committed to doing something new every week that I was off work.”

His first “something new” was to bake chocolate chip cookies. He followed a recipe he found in a cookbook and was so proud of the result that he posted it on Facebook. That caught the attention of Jeremy Uhrich, a furloughed Huntingdon middle school teacher.

“[Jeremy] sent me a message saying my cookies looked good, but he bet his were better,” McKenzie recalls. “That was all it took. We are both competitive, so we decided to have a bake-off.”

The Huntingdon mayor served as judge, and the two men gave their cookies to the borough to distribute to police officers and 911 personnel. The pair decided to go a second round, with those cookies going to the local hospital and fire department.

After that, “Cookies for Caregivers” was born, and years later the men are still coordinating the baking and distribution. Backed by a group of around 20 regular volunteer bakers, the pair have distributed thousands of cookies.

The effort brought unexpected national recognition with stories on CNN, “The Today Show,” “The Rachel Ray Show” and in People magazine. Soon, their idea blossomed into a national movement, and at its most popular point, 40 to 50 other communities were following their lead.

“People felt helpless during the early days of the pandemic,” McKenzie says, “and this was something they could do in their own house whenever they wanted, and it was for a good cause.”

While early deliveries went to first responders, the pair decided anyone who was still going to work was an “essential worker,” so they expanded their deliveries to include other businesses, including Valley REC.

“Our bakers are allowing us to make our community a better place,” McKenzie says. “We are just trying to make the beneficiaries feel special. The most unexpected response that we get regularly is tears.”

One of McKenzie’s favorite stops is at the local hospital on Christmas Eve, where he typically delivers 30 to 40 dozen cookies on that one night.

“It’s become a habit, and I don’t anticipate stopping anytime soon,” he says of the deliveries. “As long as the bakers bake, we’ll deliver. My parents always taught me to do the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing to do. I view this as the right thing to do so there’s no reason to stop.”